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a_imhoon Bottled water has 'up to 100 times' more bits of plastic than previously feared

Is there anything against glass containers? I'm debating what to use for medium/long term storage (replacing the contents) and indeed I'm wary of metal coatings.

a_imhoon Perplexity Labs Playground

I said not convinced, as in my user experince was/is still not conductive to the hype I perceive. The prompt says 'Ask anything', how should one know basic arithmetic is holding it wrong? Btw it also failed all queries in my native language after assuring (in English) it can parse them. Just nonsense/gibberish. Guess this is also a well known limitation? Perhaps my expectations were too high.

a_imhoon Perplexity Labs Playground

Ok, so what do you suggest, people paying only casual attention should know this somehow?

a_imhoon Perplexity Labs Playground

Tiresome for you perhaps, but this was my very first deliberate interaction with LLMs. Hardly a puzzle btw, more like basic arithmetic.

a_imhoon Perplexity Labs Playground

Failed on the very first try, still not convinced

LLM served by Perplexity Labs To solve the expression 2+2+2+2+2*1, you should follow the order of operations (PEMDAS/BODMAS), which stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication and Division, and Addition and Subtraction. Applying the order of operations to the given expression:

    Perform multiplication: 2 * 1 = 2
    Perform addition and subtraction from left to right: 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2

The result of the expression 2+2+2+2+2*1 is 9.

a_imhoon Meta’s approach of ‘pay for your privacy’ is wrong

So they say. TFA has a different take. It remains to be seen which interpretation will hold legally.

a_imhoon Meta’s approach of ‘pay for your privacy’ is wrong

Major mental gymnastics.

Do you want your service to be available to European customers? Play by their rules or withdraw. Nothing special.

a_imhoon Meta’s approach of ‘pay for your privacy’ is wrong

Do Data Deletion Requests solve this issue under GDPR? Just keep sending them their way and let them deal with them.

a_imhoon The Cloud Computer

Thank you for taking a look. Be warned though, I'm personally affected and just as biased as everyone else on both sides of the issue.

a_imhoon The Cloud Computer

It was a bad edit, it (should not be controversial | should be the norm) to expect equal compensation for equal work.

In slightly more detail

https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...

https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2022/09/16/the-wage-gap-...

a_imhoon The Cloud Computer

Assuming interchangeable human resources there are basically 2 options, either the company is extracting more value from everyone than the salaries they pay, in that case paying fairly would eat into the company's bottom line. Poor CXOs would not turn extra profits by keeping less fortunate employees on low salaries but just the regular one. Or the highest paid employees are not pulling their weight and their salaries are already subsidized by the rest of the company, which is also not quite fair.

Nevertheless, I agree everyone looks at this problem from their own POV, however it should not be the norm to provide equal compensation for equal work.

a_imhoon Choose Boring Technology (2018)

Agreed, also, imo boring implies that failure modes are well understood or at least documented and have a bigger community to rely on when you eventually hit them.

a_imhoon Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

Nitpicking alternatives is not the main point. There is nothing that suggest a platform like youtube has to exists in its current form.

Consider a freemium model without the threat of adxtortion, obviously this would require youtube to offer a significant value add and/or premium content besides trying to be a monopoly and gatekeeping eyes. Make it purely subscription based (e.g. Netflix before ads). Ask creators to pay for the blue checkmark. Make it a loss leader. Plenty of adult streaming sites manages to do just fine without youtube style invasive ads. I'm sure much smarter people can name countless other ways as well, it also does not need to be a 1-1 alternative either.

a_imhoon Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf

I find this a false proposition, there are plenty of other ways to to support a video streaming platform. There is nothing that suggest a platform like youtube has to exist in it's current form either. If a monetizing strategy does not work it is not the users holding it wrong. People consumed videos online before youtube and will be consuming after youtube just fine. It is not like Google is the creative mind behind the content either, in fact, the streaming part is by far the most boring problem.

I really dislike the attitude of defending megacorps and worrying about their bottom lines, especially anti customer ones like Google.

a_imhoon Firefox 117 Beta 8 vs. Google Chrome 116 Linux Browser Performance

Somewhat agree but would go a step further, benchmarks at their very best are useless, at worst are completely misleading from an end user pov. Rendering and interpreting garbage as fast as possible is distant second from filtering it out right off the bat when it comes to performance. Curating the browsing experience via content blocking can literally make orders of magnitudes of difference. Youtube is a prime example.

a_imhoon Show HN: Local development with .local domains and HTTPS

Forget editing /etc/hosts

Why?

a_imhoon On Becoming a VP of Engineering

It is not just startups, no wonder the age old wisdom is always-be-leaving if you want to get a raise/promotion.

I think the rational is more like paying as little as possible for keeping smart people around who could outperform their title. Switching jobs has a very real cost for employees, especially in harder economic times. Some will leave nonetheless, some will quite quit but some will stick around just fine.

a_imhoon Firefox 115 can remotely disable any extension on any site

You mean besides the forced update? Unfortunately not much I can help with, in my case I was deliberately running ESR 78.14.0 which was force updated to ESR 102.11.0 on May 26 and later 102.12.0 on June 20 (setting is obviously 'Check for updates'). It was a pretty big change first, so I naturally tried to revert back as much as I could. However for example Google Image Search is broken again, clicking it simply crashes the tab (Gah. Your tab just crashed), which could be fixed by tweaking some options in the earlier version iirc. Unless moz://a managed to break it a different way this time

a_imhoon Firefox 115 can remotely disable any extension on any site

once configured, I have always had my settings honored

totally different experience, FF ESR decided to update itself just the other day and break a bunch of stuff out of the blue, because of course moz://a knows better what I need and when I need it. It is very sad people like me need to put up with this abusive behaviour because the alternatives are worse

a_imhoon Passwords Are Fine

Why not just let everyone use their preferred method for authentication and not forcing a particular doing-it-the-right-way on people?

Also, how many accounts and passwords people tend to have which are pets rather than cattle? Bank and email can cause major headaches and probably everyone has 1-2 more accounts which they value and would cause significant setbacks if compromised. Passwords are plenty fine.

a_imhoon The duck in the room – the end of baseload

To a layperson like me, it is very hard to find the truth what is the true TCO when it comes to power plants, numbers depend on who you ask. E.g factoring in environmental impacts of manufacturing/shipping/fuel/installation, subsidies, how well does calculations generalizes across climates/countries/geography etc. I don't think there is a one size fits all solution, also, having diversity in the energy mix is valuable in itself.

a_imhoon The duck in the room – the end of baseload

To me it reads like the author just handwaves away the problems of solar, the exercise is left to the reader. I also find it contradictory that if we find efficient ways to store/use surplus (solar)energy, why would that make baseload unnecessary instead of profitable? It makes no sense.

a_imhoon Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

Better than humans is not really meaningful as human skills have a very wide range and they can even vary depending on the circumstances and available resources.

Also, on average is not a great target either, sometimes it makes sense, but there are plenty of examples where we definitely don't want more average work.

a_imhoon iPhone 14 Pro camera review: A small step, a huge leap

My very amateurish pov: quantity is the most important quality, take enough photos and you will end up with a few very good ones.

a_imhoon Classic SE Mistakes (1996)

It turns out developer performance is not that important.

a_imhoon The Wage Gap 2

Thanks for the clarification. I agree that these are valid points, but subtle differences at best and mostly solved for multinational companies. Not something that would justify such disparity in wages. On top of that there are obvious advantages to having a distributed workforce as well.

1) With hybrid work on the rise managing remote is already a task, granted there are different levels to it

2) Similarly time zone differences can be taken advantage of, there are people to handle on call during normal working hours and cover national holidays for example. Also, some kind of work not depending on cross timezone collaboration can be done faster e.g. answering customer inquiries.

3) Also there is strength in diversity. A diverse set of experiences and backgrounds can help not to be blindsided by a monoculture for instance

4) Indeed, taxation can add accounting overhead, but even if we take that into consideration local wages will still dwarf the full cost of remote teams in some cases.

While I find it plausible that someone would put more value in having local employees even in a multinational setting, I would argue that is the exception rather than the rule.

a_imhoon The Wage Gap 2

Fair enough, although being content and discriminated is not mutually exclusive. In fact, even if you are satisfied with your numbers you can sympathize with those who are not.

a_imhoon The Wage Gap 2

Might be true in some zero-sum sense if the highest salaries are already subsidized by the lowest ones, but let's say some company is already turning a profit on their highest paid employees, it should be theoretically possible to match those wages. Assuming the value of a unit of work is the same no matter where it is produced.

a_imhoon The Wage Gap 2

I'm not sure what you are getting at, could you please elaborate on some of those factors?

a_imhoon Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

Change location based pay to gender/race/religion/veteran/disability/etc* and half of the comments talking about market dynamics will have a very different ring to it. The change will be slow if it happens at all, after all many paychecks and bottom lines depend on not acknowledging the situation. The best you can do is probably raise awareness in the meantime and not feel shame about being demotivated.

https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...

*people are as much in control of their religion and veteran status as their location